FDR and the Democrats’ Unmatched Undemocratic Ways

Commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson have called the “coronation” of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive Democrat presidential nominee a coup coming upon another coup: the 2020 primary when front-runner Bernie Sanders was pressured by shadowy party bosses to...

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Commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson have called the “coronation” of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive Democrat presidential nominee a coup coming upon another coup: the 2020 primary when front-runner Bernie Sanders was pressured by shadowy party bosses to drop out in order to leave the “moderate” electable Joe Biden.

Now the elected candidate has been forced out and replaced with Harris, who had “entered no primary,” won not a single delegate in 2024 — or in 2020, when “she dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.” Delegates will be denied the ability to put forth nominees, as Harris is nominated virtually.

Many wonder how the Democrat Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt could come to such high-handedness, where such party bosses as Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama subvert the democratic process. The editorial board of the New York Post asked what happened to the party of “‘Lunch Bucket Joe,’” who “always aimed to identify with … the working class — the party’s base from the days of FDR and Harry Truman.” Democrats were now embracing “hyper progressive” and elitist Kamala Harris.

David Samuels presents a similar, commonly held view of American political history, of five American Republics with the last one founded by Barack Obama, who had toppled the Fourth Republic, which had been founded by Franklin Roosevelt.

FDR, presumably, “excised the New England elites in favor of the ‘New Deal alliance’ of Southerners and northern urban immigrant voters.” But then Bill Clinton embraced “global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and China’s entry into the WTO, which blew up the broad middle class that FDR’s party had spent decades building and turned the Democrats into the party of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.”

Today’s Obama-led Democrat Party is “college-educated, corporate-controlled,” an “alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics.”

Such assumptions — which are making the “conservatives” at Compact agitate for another New Deal — are based on the false idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a self-identified member of the Hudson River Valley landed gentry, became a “traitor to his class” and championed the cause of workers and the “common man,” thus instituting a “golden age” for the middle class.

This is a myth that FDR and his retinue promulgated and which I debunk in my book, Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths (2024). While Roosevelt’s name and class brought him unequaled favorable publicity, the truth is that he lived off of his family’s riches, mostly handed down by his maternal grandfather, an opium-pusher in China. Other sources came from monopolizing coal mines (a company town in Pennsylvania was named Delano) and railroads.

But from the beginning, during his one-term stint (January 1911–January 1913) as a 29-year-old New York State Senator, FDR presented himself as a “reformer.” One of the headline-grabbing issues of the day was the direct primary in the election of United States Senators, to be wrested from the party “bosses.”

Roosevelt had his doubts that a direct primary bill would have much effect, but it was a good issue to support to elevate his reputation. Knowing that star-struck reporters would favorably record his words, he gave public speeches for the direct primary, supported direct primary bills that actually accrued more power to party bosses, and played to the press corps in Albany by precipitating a headline-grabbing angry three-hour debate that ultimately ended in a recess with nothing passed.

Roosevelt’s decision to appeal to Southerners and northern urban immigrants was similarly based on political calculation as demographics shifted. He cast himself as a “farmer,” even claiming to be nothing more than a “Georgia cracker farmer” after investing in the Warm Springs property.

But as a letter to fellow Hudson River Valley gentleman farmer Henry Morgenthau, Jr. revealed, Roosevelt thought a “large number” of Upstate farmers displayed “sheer, utter, and complete ignorance.” FDR actually did the bidding of Wall Street, where he worked for several years as a Wall Street lawyer (though not a very good one) and invested in dubious schemes involving German currency and selling stock in his various companies to gullible Americans who ended up losing most of their investments.

Nor was the New Deal, presumably instituted to end the Depression, designed by the Brain Trust, the Ph.D.s with new ideas about how to uplift the masses as commonly thought. It was a creation of the very elites — bankers, corporate heads, and Wall Street speculators — to make institutional changes to their own benefit.

John T. Flynn, one of FDR’s most consistent contemporary critics (who has now been memory-holed), in the June 1939 Yale Review, called the Brain Trusters “messenger boys” for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Steel, other corporations, and Wall Street speculators and bankers. More recently, in 1989, scholar Thomas Ferguson presented them as providing “a transmission belt for the ideas of others, including, notably, investment bankers from Lehmann Brothers.”

FDR may have rejected J.P. Morgan but only to allow the advancement of rival Chase National Bank, on whose board sat FDR’s cousin Vincent Astor. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was not designed by farmers but by “messenger boys” funded by the Rockefellers and the Chamber of Commerce.

The National Recovery Administration, which fixed prices and set codes to benefit the six-hundred or so largest businesses in the country, was architected by Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch. The AAA benefited large landowners and drove small farmers and tenant farmers from the land, and the NRA destroyed small businesses.

The poor got very little of the New Deal funding, which was largely a patronage scheme — Tammany Hall on a national scale, with taxpayer-supported New Deal funds going to party bosses and areas where votes were needed.

Social Security similarly exploits workers. As Flynn wrote in 1939, “the Social Security Act was made the excuse for laying upon the workers under the guise of creating a vast reserve a pay-roll tax to support ordinary expenses.” Taxpayer-supported deposit insurance has been used to bail out banks in the 1980s and in 2008/2009. Obamacare, as David Garrow has pointed out, is “a great achievement for the health insurance industry.”

The progressive policies were designed to benefit the wealthy. When conservative Democrats like Senator Walter George, of Georgia, opposed his policies, such as court-packing, FDR publicly, in their presence, ridiculed them during the 1938 midterm “purge.” Today, the purge has been completed, with Democrats voting in lock-step or as a bumper sticker says, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who.”

As David Samuels says, we do have a shadow government, a “spooky arrangement” with Obama’s people in the White House running the show. But contrary to Samuels’ view of history, the “shadow government” was in place during the FDR era. Baruch was the largest donor to the Democrats in 1932. He also reviewed all the speeches Roosevelt gave during the presidential campaign.

Since at least the regime of FDR, the Democratic Party has been un-democratic. “Lunch Bucket Joe” was as unreal as “Georgia Cracker Farmer” FDR. We need to understand that as hyper-progressive Kamala Harris is refashioned into another working-class icon and the party bosses start playing “Nine to Five” as her theme song.

READ MORE:

He’s No FDR

Donald Trump: The Conservative FDR

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